"Groundwater - making the invisible visible"

World Water Day is celebrated annually on March 22nd. It is a day to mark the importance of water and to draw attention, worldwide, to the population suffering from water scarcity.

The United Nations Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro adopted on 22 December 1992 the decision to make March 22 World Water Day (resolution 47/193).

Water is the main constituent of all living things. Although more than half of the human body is water, it is not evenly distributed in all compartments of the body and is directly proportional to the surface of the body. On the other hand, depending on the adipose tissue, the human body contains between 55 and 70% water.

Water from the natural environment (lakes, rivers, groundwater) is a common good that belongs to us all. As water is used for many purposes (agricultural, industrial or domestic), it is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Therefore, it is the duty of public institutions to preserve, protect and regulate its use.

Although water is a renewable resource, the world's population continues to grow and demand grows. In order to be able to properly plan and manage these freshwater applications in the future, close cooperation between people, researchers and water resource managers will be vital. On the other hand, the excessive increase in water consumption means a threat to the quantitative balance, but also to the qualitative one.

Water quality degradation is becoming more pronounced, and efforts to reduce water degradation through high-tech solutions are effective in reducing the impact of threats, but at a cost that can be an economic burden.

Due to the growth of the world's population, and other factors, fewer and fewer people benefit from drinking water. The intense development of the industrial branches, of the agriculture, of the communal services, etc., led to the continuous increase of the water consumption and implicitly to the degradation of the aquatic resources. Today there is no country that does not face the problems related to the deficit of water sources, especially those of drinking water. Moreover, about 20 percent of the world's population does not have access to quality drinking water, and about 50 percent lack adequate sanitation. It is our duty to ensure that water performs its functions of maintaining life, navigating, integrating with other natural sources, of raw materials, and ensuring the comfort of people.

To protect the negative impact of water on health, it is not enough just to treat it thoroughly. The most effective way is to prevent pollution of aquatic resources. The main sources of pollution of surface water and groundwater are unsanctioned landfills near rural areas and near wells, animal complexes located near aquatic resources, chemical deposits in localities, undeveloped toilets, etc.

The liquid fraction from these sources of pollution, through infiltration, enters the groundwater and leads to their massive pollution with various harmful and toxic substances (eg nitrates, ammonium salts, pathogenic bacteria, etc.), which subsequently enter the human body.

Water resources in the Republic of Moldova are represented by surface waters (two major basins of the Dniester and Prut rivers) and groundwater.

The natural regime of river water in these basins has been modified by the construction of dams and reservoirs, created in order to prevent floods, sediment capture, water supply for agricultural, industrial and domestic consumption, as well as for fish farming.

The groundwater network includes about 112,000 springs and wells (public and private) and over 3,000 functional artesian wells. In the Republic of Moldova, groundwater is the main source of drinking water for 100% of the rural population and 30% of the urban population or 65% of the total population of the country. The rest, 35% of the total population, use surface water as a source of drinking water. About 44% of the country's population does not have access to safe drinking water.

Although all cities and municipalities and over 65% of rural localities have centralized drinking water supply systems, only 50 percent are in a satisfactory technical condition, the rest require major repairs or reconstruction.

The most exposed to water scarcity is the southern part of the country, where in years of drought the risk of drying up surface aquatic resources increases (as happened in 2007, when a number of reservoirs on the Işnovăţ River dried up).

However, the drought is becoming endemic for other regions of the country and is increasingly affecting the standard of living and rural development.

It is becoming increasingly clear that simplistic, cheap and one-sided solutions cannot always be offered for global water problems. In this context, there is a need for an all-encompassing, causal approach, focusing on the formation and acquisition of a cooperative attitude in the field of water, which is why the United Nations has called for this approach. We face many challenges in protecting precious water resources, now and in the future, and promoting and disseminating current water issues globally, regionally and locally can lead to effective management. Water certainly unites all the people of the globe, from all times.

 

"Water means life, to cherish it and to manage it responsibly together"